‘We’re all trying to get to the common goal’

In the second part of our conversation with RTD’s new CEO and general manager, Debra A. Johnson reflects upon the importance of community outreach and connecting with the public. The initial exchange published yesterday – focusing on her work elsewhere in the country, and her observations about RTD from a distance – is available here.

Your transit career began in public involvement and community relations. To what degree does that experience continue to guide the work you do now? How do you bridge the gap between what the public tells you they want and what, realistically, an agency can provide?

My background is in government relations and community relations, and I’m a firm believer that in community relations, oftentimes things will become a government relations matter. Because the boards to which we answer are representatives of the constituency that are our customers. With that as a backdrop, it’s basically ensuring that they’re engaged, ensuring that there’s no surprises, ensuring that when you’re doing something, you’re being highly communicative about what that is. Also, not making decisions in a vacuum in the sense that, hey, this is what we intend to do, but let’s get your feedback: Does this make sense? Is this the most plausible path forward? If anything, what I have learned is basically ensuring, as I said in the previous response, that we are engaging with people and not making an assumption, because we don’t know what we don’t know.

When you’re engaging with individuals, they don’t know what we know. You talk to individuals and they’re like, oh, you can just add another bus. Do they really know the ins and outs of what that costs, relative to revenue miles per hour? Does it really make more sense to decrease a headway when you have to think of the fully loaded cost in which to do that, and recognizing that it’s not just putting a bus out, it’s basically starting with a schedule, and from a schedule you deem how many vehicles you need. From the vehicle count, you deem how many operators you need. From that aspect, you deem how many supervisors to manage the transportation flow. And then the whole aspect about transportation management, which is congestion flow. Are you going to have bus bunching? All of these different elements come full circle, and we have to be able to share that with the customer and the general public as a whole, because we both have a respect for the vantage point from which we’re coming.

That’s all about stakeholder and community engagement, which I think drives all of this.I’m a person in the people business. We are not moving commodities or livestock. We are ensuring that people can get to where they need to go when they need to get there, for the betterment of their lives. And so, if we look at it from that perspective, that gets us on a whole different playing field because then you can ensure that we are providing services that meets the needs of the vast ridership base. Keeping in mind this is not some kind of science, you’re always going to have somebody who’s displeased. It’s being communicative and breaking it down.

When I was in the D.C. area and I made reference to coordinating with the Office of Personnel Management when we had to figure out if the government was going to shut down on a snow day, I can recall a bad snowstorm in February of 2003, and we had left some rail cars out, because there were a lot of events going on that Presidents Day weekend. When it came time on Tuesday morning to return to service, we didn’t have ample rail cars readily available, because that wintry mix – the slushy snow – got into the undercarriage of the rail cars. Quite naturally, there were a lot of people that were disgruntled. Dr. Gridlock, who is a columnist in The Washington Post who writes about transportation, basically let us have it. Sometime after that, working with partners, my team and I held an event called Metro Behind the Scenes. And we brought in individuals from the Office of Personnel Management, some of the institutions, higher learning institutions, that relied on transportation from WMATA, be it the University of Maryland, Georgetown and other notable entities. And we basically took them through a lesson of transportation 101. Meteorologists oftentimes predict, and then you get something different. But it was educating them on what it was that we had to do. And it’s very analogous to any department of public works: When you have more snow than anticipated, you may not have enough salt readily available, you may not have enough snowblowers, but you learn from that going forward.

Engaging with the community and educating and informing, I think, is paramount. When I worked on the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) extensions back in the ‘90s, what led me to expand in my career is I wanted to have an understanding, so if I’m going to the Hill and I’m advocating for support for a project, I have to know the nuances associated with it. When we need monies to leverage zero emission technology, what does that mean? What’s the impact if we’re going to switch over from one propulsion system to another? What’s the impact of the infrastructure cost for building that out? When will we see the return on investment? I want to know the operability aspects of it all. I want to understand what will it take for us to train our front-line employees. If you’ve spent most of your career being a diesel mechanic, and now I ask you to basically become a technician and utilize a laptop to diagnose some ancillary systems on a bus when you’re accustomed to using a wrench, what does that mean from a training perspective? Using that as a backdrop, being engaged and being highly communicative with a myriad of different audiences has enabled me to grow within the transportation industry for a better understanding of what it is that we do.

You have referenced your early career in the San Francisco Bay Area as leading you to reflect upon Helen Keller’s well-known quote, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” What did the author and educator’s words mean to you then? Has this statement taken on a deeper meaning over the decades you have worked in transit?

It’s about educating and informing. If there’s something that we want to do that we know may be a little difficult in a certain community – and by “difficult,” I mean we know they’re not going to like it – if we have the ultimate responsibility of being good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars and we have to shore up shortfalls, oftentimes people won’t like it. Having conversations about the issue at hand, it’s trying to be relatable to what’s happening.

Let’s take the pandemic, for instance. Working here currently at Long Beach Transit as I’m engaging with members of the union – it’s more than one union, I’m speaking specifically about the supervisorial unit – and they’re wanting to know, oh, why are you making people come back to work five days a week? We can’t indefinitely limit the hours in which one works. We have put safety protocols into place. When you look at the aspect of having a job versus no job, we want to ensure that people are gainfully employed, so we want to ensure that people are working eight hours, not 10 hours. We want to minimize that exposure. So, having had conversations around that and putting it out to people in those terms, in which people can understand, they may not like it. I come from the vantage point that you don’t have to be disagreeable to disagree. But let’s provide ample information so we can understand the vantage points from which we’re coming, and we can work better cooperatively to get to an understanding. Being involved in labor negotiations and every other aspect, I’ve learned that we’re all trying to get to the common goal, which is to deliver service. How do we do that for the betterment of the agency, but keeping in mind the only reason that there are members of a certain union is because they’re employees of an agency. And so, we do have to work in tandem.

When I talk about the quote – “together we can do so much” – it is basically having an understanding of what we’re doing and being committed to the cause. We may have a different thought process of how to get there, but that’s like anything with transportation. Oftentimes you can have an obstacle in the roadway, and you may take a detour, but you ultimately will get to the destination. All of this is possible if you can be highly communicative, and you can engage and have an understanding and be open to different thoughts that people may have.

That’s what so great when we talk about diversity. It’s diversity of thought as well that enables us to be stronger, because you can work with different constituencies, and they may look at a problem with a different lens that you may have not thought of. That holds even more true today. There are different political factions, there’s different wants, different needs and different neighborhoods, and being able to forge a relationship, and being engaged and communicating as much as possible, I think we’re more apt to achieve what it is that we need to achieve.

Tomorrow, Debra reflects on her values, her first experiences using transit and her views of transit equity.To read that part of the conversation, visit the News Stop.